I disagree about it being horrible. It's based off of the BFI restoration, and I've read for years that colors were something people had issues with on the WB dvd. The BFI typically does a very good job, so I'm not too worried at this point. If this is what it's supposed to have looked like during the digital years, I'll adjust just fine. Later on, I'll dig out the Amazon streaming copy to see how it looks compared to these images.

Whoever handled this has sucked out all the "storybook color" of Hammer and decided to go for a natural look which is SO wrong for this film and the early Hammers. In these struggling economic times (around the world and in England) I would not wish anyone to lose their job, but, seriously, these errors on the Hammer Blu-Rays are so frequent, so annoying, that someone else should be handling the restorations.

One reservation, however: May there still be a possibility that these captures are not reflecting the Blu-Ray release accurately???

In fairness, the grading was already in place, having been done by the BFI - it looked exactly like this when I saw it in the cinema in 2007...
I think that the colour scheme works well for the castle interiors and also the graveyard scenes, giving them much more atmosphere than the Warners disc - but some of the other interiors (such as inside the Holmwood house) looked unnaturally dark.
I can see this release dividing opinion... which is nothing new where the Hammer BRs are concerned!

Well, if you darken things up, it will tend to be "spookier," but that's not the way this film looked when originally shown or shown in revivals...until, it seems, the BFI got its hands on the film. This grading is flat-out wrong. I can hear the old Hammer guard turning in their graves. In particular Jack Asher and Terence Fisher.

Latarnia wrote:Basically, whoever did the BFI restoration decided that they were smarter and more artistic than the Hammer people responsible for this film, and transformed the film into their own vision.

Mirek

Or just didn't have a clue how these films are suppose to look and did a standard clean up/restoration on how they thought it was suppose to look.